ELEPHANT CONNECTIONS
For many people around the world, it is a fascination for elephants that first draws them into the world of wildlife conservation. It is the love and care that elephants demonstrate for their family, and their herd, that pulls at our heartstrings and implores us to work harder to fight for their protection. In celebration of elephants, read more about elephant behavior, emotional intelligence, and maternal bonds in this special blog for Mother’s Day.
“An elephant nursing her baby is so like us that she might as well be my sister”
One of the most beautiful & intriguing maternal bonds in the animal kingdom (which includes humans too) is the bond between elephants and their young. Elephants help us to cross the bridge of understanding between our species, to see “who” they are, and to reconnect with the non-human life that we share our planet with. Perhaps in them, we see a version of what we aspire to be: intelligent, social, emotional, respectful of ancestors, playful, self-aware, and compassionate. These are just some of the words that elephant behavior experts have used to describe what they have personally witnessed while observing elephants in the wild.
In the life and culture of an elephant, females are central and dominate their society. Older female elephants, sisters, their adult daughters, and all their children live together in herds led by a female matriarch who serves as the central holder of history and knowledge. The matriarch makes decisions about where the family will go and serves as their chief protector. Daughters of the matriarch typically stay with the herd for most, if not all, of their lives. Elephants find safety and security in their herd and depend on these bonds and friendships for food and protection.
The beautiful headline image by wildlife photographer and Wild Tomorrow Fund’s Ambassador, Martin Meyer, captured a moment that embodies what so many people around the world love about elephants: the love and protection shown by an elephant mother towards her family. Martin described the moment, captured at Pilanesberg National Park in South Africa, when Mum realized her baby was a little too far out of the trunk’s reach. Quickly she closed the gap of 8-10 meters to get her baby’s attention – the little one had fallen asleep! Gently she wrapped her trunk around him, pulling him close, bringing him along with her and out of harm’s way. It’s an image of innocence, joy, and love, and Martin’s photo demonstrates visually the strength of an elephant’s maternal bond with her calf. Young elephants usually remain within 1 body length of a family member for the first 5 years of life. Never too far from Mum’s reach and the soft reassuring touch of her trunk.
A newborn infant elephant is born largely helpless. For its first months, the baby sticks close to Mum, often in physical contact. Meanwhile, Mum makes soft, humming sounds to her infant. Baby elephants are adorably uncoordinated and often trip, fall in holes, and need help from the herd. Their loud cry for help brings an immediate response, with Mum, Aunts, and Grandmothers rushing in to help. They are also great babysitters, particularly for inexperienced Mothers. We can imagine that if we were sitting alongside Martin when he took this photo, we might also hear the rumble of the Mum’s reassurance to her elephant infant, saying in elephant-speak: “I am here and you are safe”.
Elephants are the largest living terrestrial animals on our planet. That translates to big babies and a long gestation period. After carrying her baby for a long 22 months, a baby African savannah elephant is born weighing around 260 pounds and only 3 feet tall. And like us, they need a lot of help and guidance from their Mother and extended family to grow and thrive. Most mammals are born with brains weighing 90% of their adult weight. Elephant brains at birth weigh only 35% of their adult brain weight. For humans, our brain weighs 25% of its adult size when we are born. That means that elephants, like human babies, do most of their development after birth. They learn everything about how to be an elephant from their Mom and other elephants within the protective herd that surrounds them.
If you’ve seen an elephant playing with its trunk, you know how adorable and delightful the intellectual development of a baby elephant is to observe. Just like a child learning to hold a pencil and understanding how to grip with fingers and toes, a baby elephant has to get to know how to work its own trunk. They experiment by tossing or whirling their trunk around, figuring out how it works. Just like this giphy animation!
“Little elephant trunks are rubbery, not-quite-under-control appendages”, writes Carl Safina, a renowned ecologist and best-selling author whose recent book “Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel” explores our relationship with the living world and the emotional lives of animals, including elephants. “Often they suck their trunks for comfort, just as a human child sucks its thumb…A baby elephant might twirl and twirl its trunk around a single blade of grass, finally grasp it, drop it, and have a hard time getting it back, then simply place the grass blade atop its head”. It takes young elephants about five months to master their rubbery trunks, to the delight of humans who are lucky enough to witness these moments.
Baby elephants also learn how to manipulate attention from their Mothers and aunties and may even become a bit spoiled. “Sound familiar?” asks Dr. Safina, before explaining that “distress calls from baby elephants are so frequent, researchers often get the impression that the youngster isn’t really in trouble”.
While elephants may not have Facebook, they too live their lives in relationships that radiate into wide, layered social networks. Two or more families that have a special friendly relationship with each other are called a “bond group”. Bond groups can be made up of family members, a former family split in two, friends, or any combination. This family group, the herd, forms the foundation for shared infant care and child rearing – an elephant nursery. Aunties and sisters watch the youngsters closely, ready to rush to their aid at the first sign of distress (or fake calls for attention!).
Elephants, even up to full-sized elephants, play games against imaginary predators and threats, just like human children who use play to learn skills for the future. Charging thru the grass, chasing a bird, ears out, and trunk waving around -this mock charge behavior is a fun practice version of what an adult elephant would do when faced by a lion, or humans in game drive vehicles who get too close. Part of the herd’s role is allowing youngsters to explore and learn through their own experiences, often through play.
An African Elephant baby falls on its trunk. Photo credit: Shannon Wild
Elephants show empathy. They help each other if one is injured. Elephants have been observed putting food in the mouth of another who is injured and removing a dart from a wounded friend. They are known to grieve their dead, and to stop and touch the bones of their departed family members.
Elephants are known for their incredible memories. This extends to their understanding of who is who in their elephant social networks. Older females have the most extensive knowledge of the voices and calls of elephants in other family groups. Each elephant at our neighboring Phinda Private Game Reserve probably knows every other adult in the population and their ‘voices’. When researchers in Amboseli, Kenya, played the recorded call of an absent family or bond-group member, the elephants returned the call and moved towards the sound. However,the call of an elephant outside their ‘friendship’ bond group did not elicit a notable reaction, while the call of a stranger caused them to group together defensively, and raise their trunks to smell.
A growing herd or a matriarch’s death can cause families to slowly split into new groups. On the other hand, fragmented families sometimes come together and merge. This splitting and merging of social groups is called fission-fusion. “Because elephants, like us, live in fission-fusion groups, what they’re doing makes sense to us. Many of the most complicated animal societies including ours, apes, wolves and certain whales are also fission-fusion”, explains Dr Safina.
For elephants, status comes with age. Elephants respect their elders for good reason – survival can depend on an individual who learned information decades before such as where to dig for water in a drought. Desert-adapted elephants visit water sources as far as 40 miles (65 kms) apart. They have been recorded covering 400 miles (650km) in 5 months. They sometimes travel hundreds of miles, along routes not used for many years, to arrive at water sources just after the onset of rains. “How did they know?” asks Dr Safina. “Can they detect distant thunder rumbling through the earth and turn towards it? How much of it is memory?” – there is so much we don’t yet know about elephants and their amazing memories and skills.
Elephant researchers have shown that the survival of elephants is directly related to the survival of their matriarch. Herds are better at survival in families with matriarchs older than thirty-five. And elephants seem to understand this too. Some elephant families follow herds that have older matriarchs. By the time a matriarch dies of natural causes, her mature daughters have gained much knowledge so that they can carry on and lead the family. In our world, this is called “wisdom”.
Desert-adapted elephant in Namibia. Photo Credit: Shannon Wild
The role of older bulls is less studied than the matriarch and her breeding herd. However, recent research has shon a light on the important role that elder males play too, in decision making and leading their male herds. They are also repositories of ‘ecological knowledge’ and elephant wisdom.
Adolescent males (between 10-20 years of age) leave their families to socialize with other males, assert their independence and do more wandering. But they don't leave family life altogether. Instead, they might join another family, or move from family to family. Young males also may attach themselves to older dominant bulls that act as “mentors,” guiding the younger ones through their teens and twenties.
When orphaned young male elephants were introduced to Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park in KwaZulu-Natal South Africa (the closest government wildlife reserve to our Ukuwela Reserve), the young male orphans, without adult supervision or role models, began working out their testosterone-fueled aggression on rhinos, killing over 30. “The rhinos were ripped to pieces” said wildlife vet Dr Dave Cooper. A park ranger said he had witnessed an elephant knocking a rhino over, trampling it and driving a tusk through its chest. Dr Cooper said: "There was a spate of killings, and it was as if they were purposeful. The rhinos were ripped to pieces." This was very abnormal, delinquent behavior. Park managers asked for help and were sent two older adult males from another park. Their presence as elders and mentors calmed the adolescents, and the rhino killings stopped.
Sadly, older elephants with big tusks – both male and female- are a big target for ruthless poachers. “Illegal killing of African elephants for ivory remains a significant threat to elephant populations in most of the range States. At the same time, the human population of Africa has grown tenfold, from 125 million to 1,225 million, creating competition for land with elephants.” said CITES Secretary-General Ivonne Higuero on the launch of a 2019 updated assessment on elephant killings. “We must continue to reduce poaching and illegal trade in ivory and find solutions to ensure the coexistence of elephants with local people.”
In 1979, there were 1.3 million elephants in Africa. Today there are less than 400,000. The human thirst for ivory means that elephants are dying younger. They are evolving to have smaller or no tusks. Killing an elder elephant, whether for its ivory or as a hunting trophy, leaves its herd unprepared, bereft of this stored knowledge, and psychologically scarred. Breaking the strong bonds that elephants share with each other causes intense suffering. Survivors carry the trauma in their memories, and often become more aggressive towards humans – which can spur more human-wildlife conflict. It’s a vicious cycle of death and disintegrating herds.
“An elephant isn’t just flesh; it is a deep store of knowledge needed for survival.”
The elephant has captivated human imaginations and hearts across the centuries, while simultaneously being destroyed at our hands due to our greed for their ivory and wild spaces. Rising human populations have cut wild spaces for elephants into isolated islands of habitat. No individual elephant in Africa is safe from the expanding range of humans, and the conflict that follows us. Older elephants remember routes and migration paths, now blocked off by fencing, farmed, or filled with the danger of human poachers. In their youth, decades ago, they followed their mothers along these connected pathways. It was their country. “Do they understand?” asks Dr Safina. “Probably in their way, yes. I hope not. I fear we don’t.”
Elephant survival in times of climate change and habitat loss, will depend on the knowledge and experience of the matriarch, as well as the male elders. We can help protect elephants by restoring access to the places and paths they once knew while keeping these protected areas safe from poachers. Elephant survival depends on them – and us!
As we reflect on our love for elephants, and the protective love they show their families, it’s also a time to think how we as individuals can help. A world without elephants would be vastly diminished. The disappearance of wild elephants is a loss too unbearable to consider. Wild Tomorrow Fund is playing a part in the protection of elephants in southern Africa by expanding, connecting and restoring their space. Our wildlife corridor will reconnect old pathways they may still remember. Once our fences come down, will their elders remember where to find water in the freshwater springs on our Ukuwela Reserve? By reconnecting this habitat, elephants can importantly exchange genetic information, meet ‘strangers’ and create new social connections facilitated by the physical reconnection of their landscape.
It is the love and care that elephants demonstrate for their family, their herd, that pulls at our heart strings and implores us to work harder to fight for their protection. In celebration of Mothers and their maternal love, let’s all work to ‘love’ elephants a little harder by making sure their wild spaces remain safe, connected and free from conflict from humans that seek to harm them.
“If you’re not outraged, then I beg you to take a little time just learn about elephants… They’re worth fighting for and we owe it to them to protect them”
REFERENCES
Safina, Carl. Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. Picador, 2015.
Africa Geographic. The importance of male elephants. 17 September 2020. Accessed at https://africageographic.com/stories/the-importance-of-adult-male-elephants/#:~:text=In%20elephants%2C%20the%20males%20tend%20to%20leave%20their,temporary%20associations%20with%20other%20males%20of%20various%20ages.
Allen, C.R.B., Brent, L.J.N., Motsentwa, T. et al. Importance of old bulls: leaders and followers in collective movements of all-male groups in African savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana). Sci Rep 10, 13996 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-70682-y. Accessed 9 May 2021 at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-70682-y
BBC Earth. Male Elephants are not the loners we once thought. http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141101-male-elephants-have-a-sweet-side
CBS News. 27 March 2019. African elephants are evolving without tusks because of poaching. Accessed at: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/african-elephants-are-evolving-to-not-grow-tusks-because-of-poaching/
African elephant: Mother and baby walking away. Photo credit: Shannon Wild